We acknowledge that we live, work and play on the unceded territories of the xwmǝθkwǝy̓ǝm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. We strive to learn from, and be allies to, Indigenous people.
Artists-in-Residence will work at Left of Main to imagine how their interests reach into a world in perpetual transition. Sitting alongside these incubative deep dives, our collaborations for presentation will be adaptive and responsive in nature and by design.
As we sit on the precipice of the unknown, where the unforeseeable and unimaginable are woven into the fabric of our daily lives, we've invited this season's artists to reflect on their practices in this book/let, which we offer in print and digital forms. All of the messiness that binds us in this moment is bound here, as we search for and approach practicing in a different kind of tomorrow.
plastic orchid factory
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman
Emmalena Fredriksson
Deanna Peters & Less San Miguel
James Gnam
Pam Tzeng & Deanna Peters
Amanda Acorn & Lisa Gelley
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines & Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
all events at Left of Main
follow @orchidfactory
from Orange; Deanna Peters & Less San Miguel; image Reza Rezaï
text Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
The year 2020 is the year of pandemic, of cancellations, of disappointment, of struggle and stress, of hustling to make a buck. It’s been tough and exhausting for myself and my collaborators. But, in a strange way, it’s been healing, this time of slowing down, of stopping, of breathing and becoming more aware of how fragile our system really is during these surreal times. I learned how to slow down.
I walk a lot more these days and I learned to enjoy the silence and strange tranquility. The wind through the leaves on the trees outside my patio, the different cycles of birds that flew about the skies as we transitioned from cold, endless winter to spring buds and leaves then finally flowers. I re-learned the little things, putting down tobacco and making food offerings in the mornings to N’shaytkin, those that came before us. These little ceremonies have grounded me back to the earth while opening up the sky a little bit more.
Re-learning, re-membering, I’ve found peace watching the clouds pass and the heat waves arrive baking the land and I kept walking. My body has been healing this year, all the little maladies that compile on us because we were driven by that pounding drum, HARDER! FASTER! MORE! Of failed capitalism. It’s no longer booming in my ears, in my skull, in my heart. My practice is finally returning little by little, a mural here, a song there, a story opens up and I am able to grasp it out of the sky and write it down.
I look forward to seeing my friends, my collaborators and seeing what we create as we’re a little calmer, a little wiser and more in tune than we might have been before this pandemic. That is where I want to be. At the gates before the race, the fall from the plane skydiving, rolling in the wind, the splash in the water during cliff diving and those tense, few minutes before walking onto a stage of people waiting to see you.
Chris Bose is a writer, multi-disciplinary artist, musician, curator and filmmaker. His newest book is N’shaytkin, a novella that in collaboration with David Mcintosh of Battery Opera was turned into a performance and music experience in December 2019. 2020 saw the performance and music being refined for festivals and touring, then the pandemic hit and shut things down. He is of the Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux Nation in BC, and currently spends his time in Kamloops B.C.
illustrations Tia Kushniruk
image & text James Gnam
Six feet. Two metres. See the folks around you. See how they are moving. See where they are going. See them seeing you. Feel the space between you. See the space around you. Move only as fast as the slowest amongst us can. Be vigilant. Identify the folks that don’t feel and see the people around them. Give them extra room. Be patient. Be kind. Be clear. Be safe.
James Gnam / Over the past six months, I have been watching with fascination as this public dance has evolved out of necessity. All of us learning (and some of us with a great deal of anxiety) about how we can share space together.
After four months of isolation, and the arts sector shifting almost constantly, we felt that it was essential to gather a group of artists that were interested in taking the COVID-19 Dance Score (above) and finding ways to fold desire, spontaneity and agency into it, to respond to pressures that we've felt to be creatively productive, by investing and working on something that could not be reproduced, sold or commodified. We wanted to build dances that could only live then, dances that were the sum of the people, places and publics they encountered.
For four weeks this summer, Ileanna Cheladyn, Shion Skye Carter, Bevin Poole Leinweber, Vanessa Goodman, Sarah Wong, Lorenz Santos, Hana Rutka, Adrian Deleeuw and Heather Barr joined Natalie and I three times a week to check in, dance and check out. We met at the Quilchena, Pacific Spirit and Jericho Beach parks. It was beautiful and essential and hard and we learned a lot about clear communication and protocol for safety and agency within the context of a global pandemic. We found new dances with new people. We were surrounded by people trained to see and feel the spaces between us.
We learnt to play with these spaces.
In a time when we need to recalibrate capitalism’s relationship to creative productivity, it felt important to invest in artists and process without an overarching goal of making a thing to sell.
illustrations Tia Kushniruk
We use our dance practice and particularly our improvisation practices to hold the big questions we have about how we are in the world, as individuals and together. In this work that we are developing at Left of Main, the main big question is:
We have been exploring how invisible forces of various kinds affect our conscious experience — from gravity to the structures we live under to our personal cares, doubts, and desires. In this work we are trying to take all this and put it into scores that emphasize agency and subjectivity, to work on meeting the unknown with humility and willingness.
Francesca Frewer / I think I love too many things but I love loving too many things. Lately I have been marvelling at tiny things and how the huge is contained within them. I have been wondering about big things like if it is possible to imagine beyond what is imaginable. I have been trying to bring an acceptance of impermanence into the way I relate to myself, to others, to things that happen, to things I do: francescafrewer.com
Erika Mitsuhashi / As I allow myself to follow genuine curiosity within my practice, I have been asking: Who’s in the room and when? What does it mean if I am spending most of my time sewing? And if everytime I go to make a dance, all I want to do is make a diorama? erikamitsuhashi.com
photos Erika Mitsuhashi
trusting the holy instant while being flipped inside out by the love revolution. returning to darkness, my main bitch, a mine full of truth rubies.
Allah set these brown chairs up for us on the side of a road at night in hopes we would consider the multiple locations of knowledge making in the body for a sec. I sit beside myself, oppressor in one chair, oppressed in the other, we get really quiet.
I submerge my heart in loveblood by building an accidental altar. jesus and mary are there in whiteface and the knife has been sharpened.
Zahra Shahab is an artist based on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people. She is interested in the word fantasy and the prophetic power of coaxing our imaginations beyond the confines of white supremacy: shahabibi.com
photos, drawings, text Zahra Shahab
BLOT focuses on the layers of salt and bacteria on a person’s skin, as a unique ngerprint, a medium through which the act of contamination can occur. In BLOT our salts function as a conductor for creativity, electricity, and infection. Simona and Vanessa explore transferability and continuous oscillations. Their bodies are an acoustic event in reverberation.
photos Ben Didier
dramaturgical support Olivia Nițiș
music Monocube
object designer Paula Viitanen
object co-designer Juan Carlos Aldazosa Bazúa
lighting design James Proudfoot
The project is co-produced by Tangaj Collective (RO) and Action at a Distance (CA), in partnership with plastic orchid factory (CA) and The National Center for Dance Bucharest (RO). It is generously supported by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund (RO) and the Canada Council for the Arts, with additional support from Cultivamos Cultura’s BioFriction.
For what has happened
has extended my vision
of the realm of possibility
Apocalyptic calm
The loving and the lonely
The able and the anxious
My unknowing is a vessel
A container, a stretching womb
Two feet flipped upside down
At night I shift until I’m shaped
Things can be both impossible
and shockingly real
If imagination stays fiction,
But soothes my heart for
this time held still,
Then please
Let me waste my hours with
fake imagery
With the sparks of colour
I see when I shut my eyelids
Let me dream what my
ancestors wouldn’t dare to
Take shape as the animal of
a long lineage of practicality
If not always care, then what?
Slowing down is thawing, is
My ability to survive tells me
I’m stronger than I think
To trust and to strip down
in an act of love and truth
I'm sore from trying
To fit and fight the frame
My second-generation ignorance
My Western freedom
of choice
The aesthetic of this
The abstraction of me
It’s my privilege to present
the non-literal
To accept the offer to speak
in printed colour
I’ve lived many lives and
I’m losing track of it
My children soon unfolding
And this:
Our precious heirloom
Sarah Wong is a dance artist and writer based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She's a second-generation Chinese Canadian who aspires to be her ancestors’ wildest dreams. She wants to feel her body in all of its romance and its functionality: sarahwong.ca
photos, paintings & text Sarah Wong
Jamie Robinson is an artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil- Waututh Nations. Her work is focused through a lens of choreography and movement.
from Four Journeys Into Mystic Time: Mysterium, stills Jamie Robinson, Shirley Clarke
*residency dates; performances postponed to a date TBD
photo Erik Zennström
Two dancers wearing identical costumes, move in perfect unison, through complicated impossible tasks, independently and in co-dependence. The dance is intersected with texts based on previous relationships, romantic experiences, fairy tales and online dating dialogues. Drawing its title from Cinderella and with music and movements that pull on our heart strings,
Entering her 30’s, Fredriksson was surprised how often she would get asked if she was married and if she had or wanted kids, compared to her male colleagues.
Fredriksson got together with dancers Lexi Vajda and Francesca Frewer to talk, dance and explore individual and social ideas around love, from online dating to childhood stories, futuristic clones and dreams — the result is Oh Well.
created in collaboration with...
dancers Lexi Vajda and Francesca Frewer
composer Kiran Bhumber
dramaturge Raïna von Waldenburg
video Nancy Lee
Developed with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Happening Dance, What Lab, British Columbia Arts Council, New Works and plastic orchid factory.
photo David Cooper
collage Daria Mikhaylyuk
BLUSCRN at VAG 2020; photo Scott Little
Ralph Escamillan takes and makes space through his making, dancing and wearing of clothing. He has founded two aliases as Van Vogue Jam (free, by-donation Vogue and Ballroom organization) and FakeKnot (putting things on peoples heads and making them perform). His mission is to make space and opportunities for Queer/POC in commonly white centered spaces. During spring of 2021 FakeKnot will be working on BLUSCRN with new media artist Milton Lim: ralphescamillan.com
What is dance to you, for you?
Good question; want the long or short answer?
Short, please.
Dance is messy, and
complicated, dependent,
productive, vast, world-
building, meaning-making,
war-torn, political, personal,
public, and private. It exists
on irradiated soil, on long-
haul flights with endless
plastic cups, on unceded
land, on promises of failure
entangled with productivity.
Dance tries to be reliable and
reproduce-able. Dance is not
always reliable or reproduce-
able. Dance is bound by
circumstances of form
(physiologies) but it works to,
and can, and does shove past
these forms. We are delightful
cyborgs, reach extended
by the technology of dancing.
A dance will sell if it is ‘the
same’ tomorrow. Dance is
perceived (mythologized) as
being consistent. Dance does
not feel consistent. I’m too
clumsy to be consistent.
Thank you.
photos Ileanna Cheladyn
How do you feel about dance lately?
I don’t mind it. It’s fun. Like,
I can play around with different
futures, better pleasures, and
even anticipatory relations.
Even if it’s, you know, always
on an edge of legibility, I think
there’s a lot of room to explore
and unspool. It’s a good
material, dance.
illustration Tia Kushniruk
What is dance?
That’s awfully broad...
Take it as it is.
Dance is eroticism on the
edge, edging, entangled limbs
and lips just missing. It is the
potential disappointment
of erotics. The alien bodies
of untouchable others
intensifying. It is an amorous
exorcism and a possession.
It is the simultaneous
annihilation and utilization
of hard-to-handle practices
(and values). Dance is not
ahistorical. The history of
dance exists partially because
the bodies that keep dance
alive and pass it on change
and disintegrate and are
erased. Dance is forgetful.
And forgetful of those it’s
evicted and appropriated.
Dance forgets what it’s doing
(me too). Dance can dismantle
itself, can disconnect its
depersonalized appendages
to recreate itself in a gentler,
less problematic form. Dance
is where opinions can be
explored. Dance must be
that tough space of working
through an opinion. An open
space of asking hard questions.
Dance fears the rebuttal of
asking hard questions, showing
unformed opinions. Dance
works against a dooming
potential of being wrong, of
saying the wrong thing. It still
says a lot of wrong things.
Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn is an emerging dance artist and anthropologist who practices and lives with deep solidarity to the Coast Salish lands that host her and her collaborators. Her work is critical of prescriptive mind/body dualisms. She makes movement and text based art in discrete, quiet and rigorous ways: cheladyn.tumblr.com
photos Reza Rezaï
Combining our experiences in street, club and stage dance, we’re investigating what happens when we turn our gazes to each other, to dance with and for each other. What arises from an intimate state of seeing and being seen? How does a focus on one another invite others to see us?
Through activities like sharing breath, carrying each other and caring for each other, we’re creating strategies that enable us to witness, anticipate and empathize with each other in co-creation and co-performance.
created, performed, produced by Deanna Peters and Less San Miguel
developed with support from Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, Young Lungs Dance Exchange, What Lab, plastic orchid factory
Set up your house of cards and care for it quietly
/
Witness an other. Stay close to and outside of them. Use them as a tether to time.
Acknowledgment as accountability.
The reflex for intimacy. An undercurrent.
Interface with the reflections of you. Wait for them to dissolve and reappear, dissolve and reappear.
Tack your ideals to a soft surface. Watch the surface be imprinted and eventually swallow them whole.
Build a fixed image. Carry this on your person.
Begin the process of encapsulation. Do you include yourself?
Reinforcing while unravelling.
Glass shovels in all parts of you excavating the things that sit below your surface.
Dig, decolonize, and pause.
It’s all work.
Are you a citizen of your body?
Transmit telepathic secrets to yourself. Whisper them to the shallow crevasses of you.
Tie down the ephemeral and ask its name. Watch the concrete fly away and evaporate.
Make a decision to give something meaning. Try this for a while and manifest anew.
Join yourself half-heartedly to something in sight.
Reward good behaviour.
Action vs. anything/everything else.
A difference that puddles and grows.
Tip between the two. Be In flux.
Choose something to carry alongside you.
Choose something to carry until the end.
//
photo Mika Manning
Unlock Most Things. Undo whatever is left.
Amorphous and still becoming, coalesce all sensations.
Ghost body.
Sheer body.
Faceless Performer.
Anticipate the momentum of you.
Spread yourself wide.
De/construct and tangle the world with you.
Let a single impetus carry you. Float along this way for a while.
Find a pace that is all your own.
Breath, a gentle hammer.
Trace the thin layer of oil between you and the earth below.
Slip and slide.
To be a happy hostage to your container.
Find stasis and hold its weight.
You are total.
Retrieve a kinaesthetic memory of you.
Introduce yourself.
/
illustration Tia Kushniruk
Avery Smith lives and makes on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh First Nations of Vancouver, BC. Avery uses her practice to explore differing gradients of effort and ease. She’s interested in subverting ratios of structure and freedom within physical tasks, creative processes, and already existing dance infrastructure: averymsmith.com
You should:
—be:
—the same
—different
—nice
—articulate
—courageous
—scared
—silent
—louder
—like this
—thinking about:
—the future
—the reason
—his feelings
—the right way
—what you want
—what she meant
—consequence
—yourself
—others
—sex
—do
—act
—say:
—that again
—it first
—it to their face
—it softly
—hi
—something
—you're on board
—what you really want
—it wasn't you
—sorry:
—I lied
—I'm late
—not sorry
—they left
—you can't
—about that
—won't cut it
—I missed that
photos Erik Zennström
—try
—smile
—not
—dance:
—that again
—like this
—better
—again
—here
—slower
—so I understand
—together
—for you
—get:
—that again
—going
—in shape
—in line
—her email
—groceries
—another one
—their word
—your nails done
—out of here
—in the shower
—them to listen
Livona Ellis is asking a lot of questions. She is curious about the how and why of people’s choices as a way to reflect on her own. She is fascinated by the reoccurring themes that are showing up in her life and also the things she didn’t expect to be there: @livona_ellis
Thank you to James and Natalie for sharing their space and supporting this incredible community of artists.
—tell me:
—what’s wrong
—I’m right
—a story
—who’s there
—why not
—your plans
—what I want to hear
—their name
—what they said
—you get it
—go:
—home
—to work
—again
—to therapy
—get him
—without
—ask
—look:
—for me
—like that
—down on
—away
—at the facts
—at them laughing
—in the drawer
—like you agree
—at the phone
—don’t touch
—in control
It was March 2020 and I was working on a solo called what do you want to be if you grow up? The work folded itself around a series of conversations that I had with my parents as a child, and with my children as a parent, about the possibility of an end of the world. Specifically, I was interested in the kinds of paradoxes that these conversations are imbued with and how these discords resonate from one generation to the next.
Our family was preparing to leave for a residency in Berlin and the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Everything stopped and our family locked down in our Vancouver home. In many ways, a kind of end of the world did happen.
photos Dayna Szyndrowski
In the weeks and seasons that followed, the work that I was doing became my life. I was having conversations with my children about mortality and hope, history, science and faith. Time in our small home began to expand and compress as a durational dance practice might.
The solo that I was working on was slowly becoming my life. I was in it. My kids were in it. My partner was in it. My neighbours and friends were all in it and we all played parts in a six month long fever dream where hours blended into months. And, because we were all swimming in uncertainty, fear and adrenaline, my memory of that time (although also filled with some very real moments of joy) does not unfold in a linear sense. It resonates more like clusters of emotional states that slide over and into the routines that we developed together.
It’s now September. The kids are back at school. COVID-19 cases are increasing and I'm back in the studio working on a biographical dystopian fictional (maybe non-fictional) solo.
choreography, performance James Gnam
rehearsal direction Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
media Vanessa Goodman, James Gnam
lighting design James Proudfoot, James Gnam
sound design James Gnam, Kevin Legere, Vanessa Goodman, New Order, The Caretaker, Ravel
stage manager Jonathan Kim
to be without to be withheld
to be alone, to feel vacant, to be a curtain drawn closed
a curtain
drawn closed
to find energy to reimagine
an ache
find energy to rethink
give and give
What do we have to offer but ourselves?
What do I have to offer
an ache
The dance of waking up
The dance of cooking, walking, chatting
The dance of laughing
wake
ache
give
I feel like I can’t breathe
the stress of it all.
imaging rolling, reaching
imagining bodies, rolling, diving, reaching
imagining the chaotic beauty of it all
things are so still
objects, are still
I’m stuck to the floor
my tongue, stuck in my mouth
life feels far away
life is here, now
I am far away
stuck in my imagination
rolling, reaching, sweating
hurling bodies, chaos
oxygen
There are cushions on the floor, for us to sit.
tree branches wag and a loud cleaning noise comes
from somewhere
Around us, space, within us, space
we talk, the sun is hidden, but may emerge
What does it mean to the world to do what we do in the world
to be us
What does it mean to us to be here, in the process, just
On the precipice of so much
On the brink
On the ledge of a new process of, a new way of working of,
an imagined place
To be in space
To be
on the precipice
of the world, of so much
of it means
to the world
to us
photos Deanna Peters
Rachel Maddock is an independent dance artist and writer based in and around Vancouver and Port Moody, BC. She is still working out (with deep gratitude) her relationship to the land she lives on. Movement and words are her best options for expression — an anchor, a lifeline, and a harbour. An opportunity to come back to self and offer the world something true: rachelmaddock.com
Well. Hello there. We are Tia Kushniruk and Jenna Berlyn, respectively. Here are our intentions of play and research.
What is beauty in such an ugly, ugly, world? Is it hiding? Has it been hidden? Have YOU been keeping it from us? Have WE been denying its existence? Because of what? Ignorance? Naivety? Perhaps self-loathing and shame? Beauty is objective. It is placed upon objects to distill a sense of an unchanging infinity. But, beauty itself is contextually different for everyone of every class, race, sex, time period etc. So, how do we define it and why do we, as humans and particularly as artists, crave it?
Ileanna Cheladyn, David Clennin, Jenna Berlyn, Samantha Krystal; photo Jenna Berlyn
Tamar Tabori, Samantha Wright; photo Jenna Berlyn
Now, moving onwards and upwards into the deep abyss of the night, we found ourselves musing this sentiment - what is beauty, when everything, every single thing that we have been taught, shown, to have perceived as beautiful, has been curated by those with regard to perpetuating and validating normalcy. What are our preconceived notions in dance, of beauty. Of opulence. Of privilege. Of ugliness. Of real dance. Of performance. Of t e c h n i q u e. Of ritual. Of drama. Of reality or realness or real life living? And how do we, being privileged enough to study dance and participate in it, take a good step back and examine the value and worth of what is truly beautiful to us, and to try to explain why it is so.
We love live theatre. It’s something powerfully moving, and powerfully reflective at the right place and the right time. We believe it is high time to continue to challenge the status quo that we have readily accepted and have been spoon-fed. We want to tell and participate in stories that reflect the world around us, and the world we want to live in. And we aren’t saying we will get it right. In fact, we are certain we will fail. But, the point of the matter is that the exploration has started, and will continue. This is just a continuation of this ever-evolving, morphing, transformative process of curiosity.
Tia Kushniruk; photo Jenna Berlyn
My name is Tia Ashley Kushniruk and I am a dance-theatre artist born in Edmonton, trained in Edmonton and Toronto, and now working in Vancouver. I have applied to Danceweb 3 times, and have never gotten in. I have overdeveloped thumb muscles from years of playing video games. I love Stories: inuashnar1.tumblr.com
Jenna Berlyn is a contemporary dance artist based in Vancouver, BC, although she just spent 5 months in the Okanagan on her family’s farm. She is excited to be once again dancing, thinking and dreaming with her friends and mentors through films, performances and practices: jennaberlyn.wixsite.com
Deanna Peters, Ahmed Khalil; photo Max Brown
to sense in-to the ephemeral and untenable;
to meander in practice of naming of things;
to acknowledge
to unlearn
ways of being that atrophy
my and y/our inherit agency
the depths and joys of my and y/our entwined realities.
to be (in) the undoing.
Use the eyes of a sensitive observer Explore the eyes as soft puddles of feeling in your skull Touch with the eyes and attune to pleasure through your seeing May your seeing awaken your skin May your skin enliven your being Open your ears Hear with the same intensity as your looking Be with the others or rather notice the WITHness that is already happening Practice empathy as a way of feeling through the other Vibe with the things Ask the things where they’d like to go Take them there Build magic Vibe with the people Vibe with the space you are in Deepen Expand Keep going Sense the rhythm of things Sense the rhythm of the beings Dance the music Repeat Insist Adapt Be in a soft rigor Create a container for feeling Vibrate with the overwhelm Joyful saturation Feel the wind Rest Build a garden with your body Be still in precarity
I had a dream the other night, I was fooling around.
I heard someone say they were educated and that meant they had been taught to disappear.
Daily, I prepare to wrestle with Kai and have on the horizon: indeterminate intimacy. And laughing and laughing and laughing. He’s 7.
The future is local, the strategy, of dirt. And as a faithful to the 4th wall, I am a believer in intra-dimensional mapping.
H+N remixed on a cadence of 157 days (only spaces)
(empty space)
the space between August and 25
between has and as
after personal and before professional
between week and beginning early
between assuming and you
(empty space)
the space after a date and before a time
(empty space)
before extra and after needing
between process and individual
(empty space)
between you and have
the space after us
Evann Siebens, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam; photos Sophia Wolfe
Pam Tzeng is a Canadian Taiwanese choreographer based in Mohkinstsis colonially known as Calgary. Pam takes pleasure in extremes to craft humourous, visceral and urgent dances about the politics of the body with objects: pamtzeng.com
Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject creates for the stage, screen, web, print and DIY spaces. It’s all dance: mutablesubject.ca
Amanda Acorn is an artist and facilitator based in Tkaronto, Canada. She creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for embodied exchange.
Lisa Mariko Gelley is an artist and mother, grateful to be living and working on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples.
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a dancer, performance maker and guest co-curator at the Centre de Céation O Vertigo based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal: vimeo.com/user6052828
Natalie LeFebvre Gnam lives, dances and raises her children on the unceded land of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people. She is working on new-futuring: plasticorchidfactory.com
illustration of Left of Main Tia Kushniruk
plastic orchid factory is an artist-run organism that uses the body as a site for research and expression. Created in 2008 by James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, plastic orchid makes, supports and advocates for divergent art works that are pluralistic in practice and form. We prioritize inclusive approaches that blend genres and facilitate collaboration, exchange and the development of new frameworks for making and experiencing art and performance.
Our hope is that everyone is able to access and enjoy our work. If there is anything we can do to help or improve your experience, please write to us: plasticorchid@me.com
To our ever-supportive, bravery-tonic-providing board of directors: Nathan Medd, Judy Haranghy, Kevin Legere, Alexandra Bolduc and Stephanie Bokenfohr. To all the miracles in our dance community at home and across Turtle Island, including all who have contributed to this book/let. To our dear friends and colleagues: Julie Espinasse, and the many magical things that come from her atelier Mille Mille, for designing a beautiful print object; and Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject for transforming it, with her usual creativity and finesse, into this online form. To our children and mentors. And to editors and early readers, Ahmed Khalil and Ileanna Cheladyn, for their critical eyes and truthful voices.
Hay č xw q̓ ə
Huy chexw
Huy ch q’u
谢谢
多謝
I luv u Tia. I luv u 2 Jenna.
Thank you, I am blessed
We dance with gratitude and love
merci bonheur de danser
Thank u Daniel
grateful for a place to play
kukstemc